I've edited my short story. My editor was kind enough to edit the first page of my first draft, just to give me an idea, and send it back just over a week ago. For my next trick, I've enlisted SteveJ/Jess Patrick to give it a read for his thoughts.

Steve usually has good suggestions. He's not an author nor an editor, but he is a better writer than I. No doubt I'll need to do more editing before I submit my "second" draft to my editor.

The one thing that's encouraging is that neither my real editor nor Steve has pointed out anything major that is wrong with it. Both liked the plot and the concept behind it. "Go forth and edit" was my initial feedback, to paraphrase.

Give a story to five different editors, and each will highlight different things to be fixed. It's the nature of writing. Proofreaders are more interested in fixing typos, grammatical, and punctuation errors. Editors can sometimes shred a story to its core, conceptually, or otherwise.

I paid a great deal of attention to continuity and fact checking when I initially wrote it, right down to whether a particular town had its own police force or relied on county mounties. An editor would catch most continuity problems: "Dick pulled out his only weapon, a .45 magnum," then later "stabbed his adversary in the heart with a shiv." Fact checking errors are not so obvious to catch, unless someone were to misstate the years of the Civil War by a few decades. In any event, fact checking is the author's job, IMHO.

My editor may send it back to me for another edit, and half expects that to be the case. That's fine. She knows I've never before written fiction, and wouldn't have solicited a story from me if she didn't think I could write one, given her guidance.

I'm making progress!